I have published one-on-one interviews with more than 300 global leaders including former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, White House Senior Advisor and Assistant to the President Valerie Jarrett, and President of Harvard University Drew Faust. I have also interviewed celebrities such as American rap icon Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson and 14-time Grammy Award-winning singer, songwriter and producer Alicia Keys on their philanthropic efforts. Previously, I served as the first online editorial and partnerships manager for the Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship, a year-round platform to accelerate entrepreneurial approaches and innovative solutions to the world’s most pressing social issues.

GAVI Alliance CEO: Leadership Is About Vision and Responsibility, Not Power

Recently, I interviewed Seth Berkley, CEO of the GAVI Alliance, a public-private global health partnership committed to saving children’s lives and protecting people’s health by increasing access to immunization in poor countries. We discussed the evolution and impact of the organization, their unique approach to development, their secret to successful collaborations, and much more.

Seth Berkley joined the GAVI Alliance as CEO in August 2011, as it launched its five year strategy to immunize a quarter of a billion children in the developing world with life-saving vaccines by 2015.

Prior to joining the GAVI Alliance, Seth was the founder, president and CEO for 15 years of the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI), the first vaccine product development public-private sector partnership. Under his leadership, IAVI implemented a global advocacy program that assured that vaccines received prominent attention in the media and in forums such as the G8, EU and the UN. He also oversaw the creation of a virtual vaccine product development effort involving industry, academia, and developing country scientists.

Rahim Kanani: What have been some of the milestones of impact for GAVI since its founding?

Seth Berkley: The GAVI Alliance has achieved many things in its first dozen years, but none more important than helping save more than 5.5 million lives and prevent untold illness and suffering.

Think about that number. It is enormous and made possible only through the collaboration of GAVI Alliance partners, such as UNICEF, the World Health Organization, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Bank, the vaccine industry and other private sector partners.

Each brings something different and critically important to the effort to immunize children in the poorest countries – whether clinical knowledge and support, financial management, private sector know-how and more. Together, we have helped immunize an additional 325 million children who might not otherwise have had access to life-saving vaccines.

We collectively now are in the midst of a campaign to immunize an additional quarter billion people by the end of 2015, which we estimate will save up to 4 million more lives. This will have significant additional benefits with respect to improving living standards, health and the global economy.

That’s because children who are vaccinated live longer and have fewer illnesses. This protects families and whole communities. And it reduces ongoing healthcare costs, expands educational opportunities and creates a more reliable workforce. This, in turn, creates a more stable community, higher productivity and stronger national economies. Immunization provides an important foundation for political stability and economic growth.

Rahim Kanani: With regard to raising funds–in your case billions of dollars over the years–in order to continue and expand your efforts, what is it about your approach that’s unique to the development space?

Seth Berkley: Finding innovative ways to deliver vaccines to children in developing countries is at the heart of our work. The very fact that we don’t have people on the ground but rather work in an alliance with other organizations is itself an innovation that was the basis of GAVI’s establishment in 2000.

That innovation extends to the way GAVI raises funds for immunization. GAVI works collaboratively with the private sector – from investment banks to vaccine suppliers to corporations to members of the Forbes 400 – to find new and better ways to raise and apply resources, and broaden the base of participants in global health. At its core, this kind of innovation is designed to provide more money for health and more health for the money. GAVI has garnered significant interest from those in the private sector, which is critical during a time of fiscal austerity.

One program works closely with investment banks to raise funds for immunization on the capital markets. The program is called the International Finance Facility for Immunisation, or “IFFIm.” It uses long-term payment pledges from donor governments to create and sell what investors call “vaccine bonds.” Specifically, IFFIm has secured $6.3 billion in pledges from nine governments to be paid over 23 years. This, in turn, has helped float bonds that have raised $3.7 billion on the capital markets for immunization over the past six years.

Here again the alliance comes into play. We work collaboratively on this program with investment banks, donor governments, the World Bank as IFFIm’s treasury manager and private investors. In this way, IFFIm has enabled GAVI to nearly double its spending on immunization.

Rahim Kanani: And what is the secret to pulling it all together?

Seth Berkley: GAVI’s secret is ensuring that our collaboration is a win-win for all involved. IFFIm helps GAVI but also provides a competitive financial return. Or take another of GAVI’s innovative finance initiatives: The Advance Market Commitment (AMC).

In this model, GAVI works with pharmaceutical suppliers, donor governments, the World Bank, the Gates Foundation, UNICEF and WHO.

Under the AMC, donors have committed $1.5 billion to incentivize the production of pneumoccocal vaccine that meets the needs of our developing country partners (there are different strains of pneumococcal pneumonia in some developing countries and manufacturers have included these strains in their new products) at a pre-agreed price. The donor commitments provide manufacturers with an incentive to build manufacturing capacity to produce the pneumococcal vaccine, which protects children against the leading cause of pneumonia, which in turn is the leading cause of death for children under age 5.

Basically, the companies are increasing supply which is driving down the cost of vaccines and we are increasing demand for the vaccines by aggregating demand and helping developing countries pay for them at a lower, sustainable price. It’s economics, and it works.

This is helping bring in new market entrants, driving down prices over time, and has accelerated the introduction of the vaccines into countries that otherwise could not afford it. GAVI has now approved 46 countries to introduce pneumococcal vaccines under the AMC, with 18 having already rolled them out. Collaboration works.

Rahim Kanani: At the Clinton Global Initiative this year, you spoke on one particular initiative for which you have already raised $52 million this past year from the likes of J.P Morgan, Comic Relief and the LDS Church. What more can you tell us about this endeavor?

Seth Berkley: The GAVI Matching Fund is a major new and innovative private sector initiative under which the UK government and the Gates Foundation have pledged about US$ 130 million combined to match contributions from corporations, foundations, not-for-profit organizations, and faith-based organizations; but they also will match contributions from their customers, employees and business partners thus further increasing the leverage of the investments.

And while we have raised US$ 52 million in the first year of the program – a remarkable sum that will help vaccinate tens of thousands of children – corporations are sharing their business competencies to help solve supply chain and logistics management issues as well.

The GAVI Matching Fund is bringing significant visibility to immunization. One of the Matching Fund partners you mention is Comic Relief, which has a popular annual telethon on the BBC. This year, its Sport Relief campaign featured immunization, putting the issue in front of 6 million UK viewers, as well as a global audience.

Or consider the Spanish savings bank, la Caixa, which not only has contributed important funding to GAVI through its foundation, but also has organized an entire Business Alliance in Spain to raise funds. One of those business partners is the soccer powerhouse Atletico Madrid, which featured immunization at a recent match. These kinds of events are bringing enormous visibility to child vaccination.

The charity arm of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which has volunteers in 179 countries, just named immunization as a major humanitarian initiative. This means the million days of volunteer labor it contributed to causes last year now can be used to support immunization services. During the launch of two vaccines in Ghana earlier this year, for example, the church arranged for 1.5 million SMS messages to be sent notifying Ghanaians about the program.

Rahim Kanani: What are some of the leadership lessons you’ve learned pushing for social change at the global level?

Seth Berkley: Leadership is about vision and responsibility, not power. And I try to model that in all of my interactions. I am responsible for my staff and my organization, to my board and my donors, as well as to the countries we work with. I try to empower them knowing we all are interdependent.

I also am responsible for my own children. My kids are protected against the deadly diseases that are the focus of GAVI’s work. So are children throughout Europe and North America.

We see it as our responsibility as parents and as a caring society. We understand, too, that a small investment now pays rich dividends in the future.

GAVI’s goal is to give the same protection to children across the world so they can also enjoy healthy and productive lives and help us meet our ambitions for a fairer and more prosperous world. It is my responsibility, as the leader of GAVI, to make sure we are accountable for that goal and that we rely on data for our decision making. This means being self-critical and honest about any shortcomings or failures so that we can learn from things that are not working.

Because we can’t rest while 1.7 million children are still dying every year from diseases we can already prevent. And new vaccines are being developed all the time which could save many more lives and dramatically improve people’s health.

And this goes beyond the traditional burden of childhood infectious diseases. One of GAVI’s greatest successes was getting hepatitis B vaccine into the 70 or so poorest countries in the world. In China alone, less than 1% of children under 5 are chronic carriers of hepatitis B, down from 10% a decade ago. This will prevent liver cancer later on, which used to claim 1/3 of a million lives.

We now can also protect women against cervical cancer through the relatively new HPV vaccine, which is one of the largest cancer killers of women in the developing world with more than 275,000 deaths each year. And we could be close to effective vaccines, too, to combat malaria and HIV/AIDS, an area of research in which I have been closely involved. So we need to keep up the momentum.

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